07.17.13
Making work not pay: Digital progress to disempower
Yesterday, an article from TIME magazine on the obvious: Digital technology has destroyed making a living on recorded music unless you’re at the very top of the winner-take-all society. The euphemism the gurus of tomorrow have developed for it is the sharing economy, or an economy in which only the 1 percent, or a very few, own all the share. More recently, the blog has discussed it here and here.
It’s not news that the sharing economy has demolished the music business. However, what you don’t often see are the actual statistics on how little even well-known names get for their work.
The fast-growing music-streaming service Spotify received a very public put-down on Sunday when singer Thom Yorke [of RadioHead] and producer Nigel Godrich, members of the band Atoms for Peace, announced via Twitter that their music would be pulled from the platform …
On Twitter, Godrich wrote that while streaming services can help established artists generate money from their past work, new artists are being stifled because of low payouts. “New artists get paid f–k all with this model. It’s an equation that just doesn’t work,??? he wrote.
The magazine added that independent music acts make about half a penny/song per stream.
Let’s do some obvious arithmetic: 1,000,000 x .005 = $5,000.
One million is major national hit numbers. Over the course of a year, a 5000 dollar pay-out is a pittance. For 100,000 plays, it’s a virtually not-worth-doing 500 bucks. Smaller numbers, and like Google’s profit sharing model for AdSense impressions, the artist can probably wait for 10 years of play for the threshold required to mandate cutting a check.
However, the operating environment in the winner-take-all digital economy is that the owners of capital make all the swag from the tools of digital distribution. From TIME: “The three major record labels actually own a minority stake in Spotify, which means they will be earning profits from the company’s overall future success whether or not it benefits individual artists.”
“The alternative before streaming was rampant piracy. A fear of returning to the days of Napster — along with a complacency on the part of record labels who can win with Spotify without necessarily having their artists win too …”
Paradoxically, this piece on one of the guru billionaires behind the digital awakening, Sean Parker, recently pilloried for an excessive wedding in Big Sur:
Napster founder, former Facebook president and Spotify billionaire Sean Parker has been forced to pay a $2.5 million (£1.6 million) fine after his extravagant star-studded wedding in California took place in a protected coastal area.
The 33-year-old, who was portrayed by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network, married singer-song writer Alexandra Lenas in a $10 million ceremony on Saturday in Big Sur.
Officials were notified that he had reportedly built a small village – including a gated cottage, fake ruins, bridges, ponds, waterfalls and a huge dancefloor – without permission in a closed campground owned by Ventana Inn & Spa …
From Napster, and the bad old days of music piracy, to Spotify, the new bad days of shrinking the pie and taking what little is left off the peons, like grains of sand. He has all the bases covered.
The magic of the corporate technological revolution is that it does not result in progress. The software applications merely make the collection of monopoly rents on content production globally efficient. Simply by holding the distribution networks and applications, remuneration can be reduced to record low levels while using the group to keep individual corporate entity profit high. With the global reach of the world-spanning network, you can do that with every bit of intellectual or creative content created that is copied digitally.
This is the economic model and technology which will eventually get to hanging everyone from the lamp post for the benefit of the few.
We can cheer for the eventual destruction of Spotify as it serves no real purpose in the betterment of the artistic jungle. Maybe it will even happen. It would be only a small victory in a losing war. But the revenge aspect, the idea that one digital bilking operation/Ponzi scheme failed can yield minor satisfaction.